Technology review via ACM Technews, reports that “Microsoft researchers in Beijing are using location-based social networks to study changes in human patterns of behavior in time and space. Using data from a Chinese location-based social network called Jiepang.com, which is similar to Foursquare, the team downloaded more than 1.3 million location check-ins from five major cities in China. Because the data includes the users’ hometowns, the researchers could determine whether check-ins took place in a user’s own city or elsewhere.

The researchers used the training data to learn local and non-local mobility patterns and visit location popularity. They developed an algorithm that predicts a user’s next location based on current location and whether the person is local. The most effective results came from analyzing a person’s behavior patterns and estimating the extent to which this person resembles a local user, thus creating an indigenization coefficient that helps forecast future mobility patterns.

The researchers say their method significantly surpasses the performance of mixed algorithms that use only individual visiting history and location popularity. Beyond helping businesses target travelers or local people, the algorithm could be used to monitor changes in a person’s mobility patterns over time, which could help anthropologists study migration and how immigrants assimilate into a local community and contribute to the nascent science of computational anthropology.”

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“I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and cause me to tremble for safety of my country; corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in High Places will follow, and the Money Power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the People, until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands, and the Republic destroyed.”
ABRAHAM LINCOLN, letter to Col. William F. Elkins, Nov. 21, 1864
Ref: The Lincoln Encyclopedia, Archer H. Shaw (Macmillan, 1950, NY)